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Neil Josten wakes up to coffee and a croissant, and wonders if he's dreaming. Two years ago, breakfast was a shitty cup of bodega coffee and half a plain bagel, and now he’s waking up to real food and coffee that actually looks like it has caffeine in it. He’s a college athlete with friends and a support system and a boyfriend- he wonders what he’s done to deserve all this. (He wonders briefly if his mom would resent him for this, for having such an easy life, for finding happiness without her. Neil pushes the thought down, saves it for another time, another day. For now, he is happy.) According to the sleeve on the coffee cup, it’s from a bakery that just opened near campus, one he’d been meaning to stop by. Neil recalls a one- off comment he’d made to Andrew the other day, a complaint that he’d been too busy with midterms to stop by the shop. Andrew hadn’t responded, preoccupied with something or other. He wonders if Andrew had been listening and remembered, or if he just knew Neil well enough to guess he wanted to go there. Either way, Neil Josten is embarrassingly smitten with him- something he’ll never say out loud, but he’s sure Andrew is aware of.
Andrew hasn’t left a note, but Neil knows it’s from him because there’s a small, blank postcard on the dorm room table, the kind nice restaurants and hotels tend to give out- depicted on it is the inside of a cafe, with The Hare Provisions written in italics on the bottom. Lately, Andrew has been bringing him items like this- small tokens of places, people, and events. To Neil, these items are grounding- a reminder that this is his life, that Palmetto and the Foxes and Andrew are real. He picks up the postcard and places it inside his bedside table, strewed atop the rest of Andrew’s gifts. When his memories become too much, or the instinct to keep running kicks in, he has these things, reminders of the people who love him and the life he’s built for himself. Andrew’s postcards, stickers, pins, buttons, receipts, and other such things have become a lifeline for Neil.
As with many things, he doesn’t understand what led Andrew to start gifting him these. Gift- giving has always been a love language of his, but usually Andrew would give him things like this morning’s breakfast- gestures, more than anything else. Andrew wasn’t one to say ‘I love you’ often, if at all, but he’d always made sure Neil knew he did. When Andrew brought Neil a receipt this fall, to say he was confused would be an understatement. The receipt had been from the campus bookstore, detailing the purchase of several binders and notebooks- nothing particularly special. Andrew had given it to him silently before heading off to meet with Aaron, leaving Neil entirely in the dark as to what was going on.
Initially Neil had thought it was a silent request to return the items, but he didn’t have any of the items on the receipt. It could be a request to pick up Andrew’s purchase from the store, but that didn’t make sense either; the dorms were near enough to the bookstore that Andrew could’ve picked everything up himself. Not to mention that the receipt dated the purchase as 6:00, a time when Neil was sure Andrew didn’t have class (the lazy fuck wouldn’t wake up before 8 unless there was practice, and even then Neil had to practically drag him out of bed- Andrew was a lot of amazing, wonderful things, but he was rarely motivated and absolutely never a morning person) so he surely had time to pick everything up himself. He’d kept the receipt, knowing it surely meant something, but without knowing what.
Next, Andrew had left him a scratched off lottery ticket worth an impressive sum of absolutely nothing. Thrown for a loop, Neil very nearly threw the ticket away, but couldn’t. Something about it, he supposed, just felt important. A part of him wondered if it was supposed to be an insult- something that seemed valuable, but turned out to be just a piece of paper. He’d wondered to himself if Andrew had finally grown bored of him, now that he really was just Neil Josten. Later that day he’d tried to ask Andrew what it was for, but had been met with silence and a piercing stare.
By the third random trinket, Neil had connected the dots- a pen taken from the restaurant the Foxes celebrated their first win of the season at. When the check had come, he’d noticed how Andrew picked up the checkbook for a moment after Wymack had paid, but did not realize why until he was presented with a green ballpoint pen adorned with the restaurant’s name. Adorned, to be fair, is an overly flattering way of putting it. More accurately, it was printed on the pen so badly that half the letters were illegible and the other half uneven and wonky. Still, Neil realized what it was- a memento of the night, and of the Foxes. After that, it clicked-
The first gift, a receipt for the first proper school supplies bought since Neil’s arrival to Palmetto- he’d just continuously stolen notebooks from Kevin during his first year (he had way too many problems to concern himself with then, and Kevin needed to learn not to leave his notebooks out anyways. That Neil had done his math homework in Kevin’s diary more than once was Kevin’s fault- for someone who grew up in the Nest, the guy is surprisingly incapable of hiding things. Neil had intended to continue this cycle into his second year at Palmetto State, but after stumbling across a certain entry regarding Seth in Kevin’s diary, he swore to never go in that God forsaken dorm ever again. As such, he needed new books). For he second gift, Neil would have to look at it again to understand what it meant-
The scratcher read ‘LUCKY 10s- Get Three Tens and Win Big!’. Instead of the winning 10 10 10, Andrew had gotten 10 03 06. Neil’s number, his number, and the year they met. It was no wonder, he thought, that Andrew wouldn’t say what these were- this sort of thing was too cheesy for him, too embarrassing to admit aloud.
Neil picks up the postcard, his newest item, and jams it into the bedside drawer. He should probably buy another drawer- or just a box for all of these.